Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

... to the many-talented gfish!! Have a good one!!

After the Information Age?

What comes after the information age

We have all learned a narrative about the history of economics that goes rather crudely like this: for most of human history, economic surplus could be derived from agriculture, and great feudal estates could be built on it. Then during the Industrial Revolution, agriculture became commoditized and value moved to manufacturing. After that, value moved to information.

Furthermore, to remain profitable, each stage of economic growth had to adopt techniques from later stages: agriculture had to become more like manufacturing, and then both had to adopt information-rich practices.

But the Information Age was surprisingly short. In an age of Wikipedia, powerful search engines, and forums loaded with insights from volunteers, information is truly becoming free (economically), and thus worth even less than agriculture or manufacturing. So what has replaced information as the source of value?

The answer is expertise. Because most activities offering a good return on investment require some rule-breaking--some challenge to assumptions, some paradigm shift--everyone looks for experts who can manipulate current practice nimbly and see beyond current practice. We are all seeking guides and mentors.

I'm not sure I entirely agree. I think creativity and craftsmanship come into it, too. They're not the same thing, though they often occur together. I would also add community and collaboration. Not all value is economic.

Gadget lust nicely sated...

The Zoom H2 I ordered two Saturdays ago arrived this afternoon, too late for me to show it off at our 2pm group meeting, but early enough to mostly destroy my productivity after that. It's pretty nice.

It has its limitations. The recording medium is an SD card (or up to a 4GB SDHD card); since it's DOS formatted the max file size is 2GB. At two channels x 24 bits x 44.1kHz a 2GB card will give me a shade over 2 hours (based on the fact that the display shows 32 minutes for an empty 512GB card). Easily enough for a typical concert set, but I'd have to swap cards if there were two hour-long concerts back-to-back. They're getting cheap. I get the same two hours recording 4 tracks onto a 4GB card.

Of course, if I want lots of recording time I can always switch it over to MP3 mode.

It takes line or microphone in, which of course resetricts it to 2 channels. For what I intend to do with it, it's fine. Making it pretend to be a USB drive isn't completely trivial, but it's close enough (plug it in with the power off, and press a button); fortunately card readers are ubiquitous (except that I can't seem to find mine at the moment...)

So far I've only tried a little hand-held, spoken word recording; it sounds fantastic, to my (distinctly non-golden) ears. It's nicely pocket-sized, and has a camera tripod mount (with a "mic clip adapter" -- basically a conical piece of plastic -- that screws into it). Has a 9vdc adapter, and runs on two AA batteries.

On the whole a fantastic little toy tool. I look forward to playing with using it in the near future. A review will be coming soon -- after I get done with the shipping!

The Eternal Flame

xkcd: With Apologies to Robert Frost

( Some said the world should be in perl/some said in lisp... )

Somebody ping Kanefsky